Women’s Pockets and the Construction of Privacy in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

1 On eighteenth-century women’s increasing responsibility for run ning the household, see Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Much has been made of the “birth of privacy” in the eighteenth-century interior: see, for example, Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), esp. 149–80; and Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House, a Social and Architectural History (London, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). Yet, privacy was a privilege enjoyed by few, and recent historiography has insisted on the lack of privacy of the more modest classes: see Tim Meldrum, “Domestic Service, Privacy, and the Eigtheenth-Century Metropolitan House Hold,” Urban History 26, no. 1 (1999): 27-39. There was not merely a social but also a gender discrepancy regarding privacy. On gender and spatial control in the eighteenth-century domestic interior, see Tita Chico, Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005). 2 The cost of having a separate room or a locked writing desk made those luxuries inaccessible to most women. Chico stresses that the dressing room was only a feature of elite houses. She also points out that female spaces in the domestic interior, unlike men’s, were never strictly private (46–77). Primary sources substantiate her analysis. For instance, courtier Charlotte Papendiek, assistant keeper of Queen Charlotte’s wardrobe, although a member of the elite, had no room of her own. She wrote in her journal in 1783: “The dressing room upstairs I arranged for Mr Papendiek’s own use ... so that here he could practise [his music] undisturbed ... and receive his friends and feel quite independent. I established myself, with my little all, in our bedroom, placing Women’s Pockets and the Construction of Privacy in the Long Eighteenth Century